Improvisation for GMs

The Anglo-Saxons didn't know role-playing. They didn't need to; they still did their swordplay and adventuring for real. But they had something similar: the Scop. This was the Old English ancestor of the Minstrel, an oral poet who would sing or tell heroic tales after dinner in the hall of the local lord. If you know Beowulf, you may remember the Scop in Hrothgar's hall.

Why am I telling you this? Because we as GMs, the very modest modern versions of oral poets, can learn from the Scop. His most important lesson is this: Don't memorize your poem. The early medieval oral poets (and their descendents in Kyrgyzstan, for instance) can reproduce an epic of several thousand lines, the singing of which will last a whole night. Yet they don't learn it by heart. Instead, they are trained by their masters to memorize the story, its sequence and its characters. The actual lines of the poem are improvised, using formulaic metric sequences. Hence the oral poets recreate an epic instead of merely reproducing it.

The GM as Minstrel

The task of the GM is similar to the Scop's. He knows what is going to happen in the story and who its main characters are, but he will have to make up the details while telling it. Improvisation is even more important to role-playing than to oral poetry, because the GM is not the only one creating the story. You know the situation: Even if you have prepared your game for hours and hours, even if you are using a pre-published adventure - your players will always find a way around it, upsetting your plans and forcing you to improvise.

Try to see this as a good thing. Improvisation is, in fact, a powerful tool that can improve your game and make things easier for you. The best GMs are known to be the ones who can jot a couple of ideas on a sheet of paper and then run an eight-hour session without even looking at it. This is not a gift bestowed by Sigmar on some lucky guys; it is a craft you can learn.

Improvisation means Preparation
The first lesson to learn is that you have to be prepared to be able to improvise. Though this may sound paradoxical, it is a fundamental truth. Take the Scops. They had to learn their formulae and practise their metrics and sing their songs for years until they were ready to perform at a royal court. Similarly, there are a few things you should be familiar with before you start improvising large parts of your campaign.

First of all, you must know the rules to be able to forget them during the game. You will need your head free of numbers and charts, so you can focus on the story and the characters. If a critical rule question comes up, all you must know is where to look it up. In other words: don't worry about the rules as long as you are familiar with the basics.

Secondly, you should feel at home in the Warhammer world. Again, this does not mean that you should learn the names of all electors, town rulers and lovers of Countess Emmanuelle by heart. However, make sure that you understand how this world works and how it looks, especially the part of the Old World where your campaign is set. In other words, you should be aware of the fact that there are things like the aristocracy, the guilds, or feudal rights, and how these things affect the people living in that world. Moreover, get some impression of how people of different social backgrounds dress, how their houses look like, and how villages and cities are structured. This sounds like a lot of dry reading, but it doesn't have to be. In fact, being a player in someone else's campaign or reading a Warhammer novel can teach you almost as much about the game world as history books. This is a game, after all, and it is often more important to get into the atmosphere of this fictional world than to collect a plethora of facts.

Thirdly, get to know the player characters. Have a copy of their character sheets at hand, or note their stats, their skills and trappings on a separate sheet of paper. This way, you won't be forced to ask revealing questions such as: "Does any one of you have Sixth Sense?" Add a few notes about each character's background, important enemies or friends, unresolved conflicts, mysteries and plot hooks. If you ever run out of ideas during your game, you might look at these notes and bring up a shadow from the past.